Adalaide Morris considers ‘tutor texts’ in the Electronic Literature Collection and, in doing so, articulates a poetics for the emerging field of e-lit. Instead of fulfilling Ted Nelson’s dream of ‘computer lib,’ the most compelling entries in the Collection emphasize the continuing necessity of writing under constraint. When the revolution
turns out to be, not a liberation from a culture of control but its
transformation, practices long familiar to experimental poets in print become generalized throughout new media and their panoply of
‘thinkertoys.’